Spot Welder Stand

[Scratch]

I finally got a spot welder form HF. I got the 240V one and I’ve heard some great things about it. It seems to work awesome too, but I really wish it had a foot pedal option so that’s the first mod I’m going to add.

I want it to either be mobile or take up as little space as possible in my small shop. My first thought was to make a simple “post and pedal on a rolling base” configuration like this, but the actual spot welder itself is pretty heavy at about 30 pounds, so I’m concerned about it being too top heavy.

then I thought wait a minute, I have this rolling cart I built to house all of my most used clamps, fixtures and other tools that always sits at the end of my fixture table, and there’s always been this large gap of space that I felt like I always needed to fill. Here’s a couple pics of the rolling cart. For context the cart has footprint of about 34"x 22" and is made mostly from 2” square tubing.

and here is where it sits at the end of my table. The cart is slid in as far as it’ll go because I store my pallet jack under the table here too, and the cart hits the pallet jack, you just can’t see it in this picture. If the pallet jack wasn’t here I could push the cart in about 10" more, but I like storing the pallet jack there. It’s plenty of room to put a spot welder, and there’s a 240V plug mounted underneath the table right below the chop saw, so I was thinking about putting the spot welder right here. I propped it up on a wooden block about where I’d want it. When needed, I just roll this end of the cart about a foot or so to the right and have plenty of room for spot welding. Then roll it back when I’m done.

But if I left it there, it would be in the way of my chop saw operation which I do use very often so I’d want it to be able to be slid in and out of the way like this. Ideally, I would want it to slide back about 8"-10" like in this picture.

Here’s a better shot of it pulled out for use and pushed back for storage.

So what I’m thinking now is to keep my original design but remove the rolling base, keep just this part:

and attach the entire “post and pedal” configuration to some sort of sliding system attached to the back of my fixture cart, but I’m not sure what type of “sliding system” I should use?

Some options I’m considering are using receiver hitch tubing, heavy drawer slides, or a “Unistrut and trolley” type system, but I’m not exactly sure of how I want to do them, or if there are any other options that I’m forgetting about that may work better.

Lots of creative fabricators here… anyone have any ideas or input, or maybe built something similar that I could take some inspiration from?

[LopezBart]

I’ve had one of these spot welders for a while; they work well. I think it would be worthwhile setting up your treadle mechanism so that over-traveling the treadle turned the power on. This would leave both hands free to hold and locate the parts to be welded. Making it so that the welder can readily be removed for manual use might be useful, but the short tongs and weight makes it awkward to use that way.

One idea that has worked well for me on this sort of cart is to have some small wheels (inline skate wheels work if you have a smooth slab) at the rear, and a handle and rubber pads in the front. You can readily move the cart by picking up the front handle, but there’s enough load on the rubber pads to locate the assembly securely when you set it down.

[Scratch]

So I made a design change. I was going to mount my spot welder to my fixture cart which lives at the West end of my fixture table, but I’ve been using the spot welder a lot these past few days and it’s been handy to use on both sides of the fixture table. I now realize that having it mounted to my rolling cart, and with the small size of my shop, I probably wouldn’t roll the cart to both sides of my table where I’ve been using it.
It would be handy to be able to use it anywhere on the table I wanted, but I still want to add a treadle system to it. Then I remembered the answer was staring me in the face… I have a fixture table dummy. Just make it into a fixture!
So this is what I came up with. The design is pretty much exactly what I drew up on the white board. minus the rolling base.

It easily stands on its own also.

But I made it able to be mounted anywhere along the fixture table edge with a Fireball tools tacking bolt.

Here is a better shot of the treadle system. It works perfectly! I also added an adjustable bolt to push against the lower shelf since my table top isn’t perfectly centered on my table frame. This way I can give the bolt a few turns if it’s not butted right up to the shelf. It makes it extremely stable.

Here’s a shot of the top of the treadle system.

I was going to try to figure out a way to make the “over-travel” turn the power on, and I still might, but I like pushing the pedal all the way down for clamping and I still like being able to control how long the power is on by hand so I’ll keep it this way for a while at least. And I store it right where I originally wanted it on my fixture cart. I’d like to come up with a better mount for it on the cart, but right now a bungee cord works great.

[Juskos]

Great idea, and you can weld a tab onto your cart so it can still be mounted and used in that location too.